Powerful senator calls his community the 'septic system' for Orlando

Aaron DeslatteTallahassee Bureau Chief

TALLAHASSEE — An influential state lawmaker says he is tired of his community being treated as the “septic tank” for Orlando and is pressing for more money to deal with damages from polluted waters flowing out of the rain-swollen Lake Okeechobee.

Thanks to a wetter-than-usual rainy season, the lake waters -- fueled by flows from south of Orlando and off of fertilizer-laden agricultural lands -- are at levels high enough to require discharges into South Florida's major rivers.

This summer, discharges into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers have contributed to major algae blooms that have mucked up the rivers and threatened tourism — spurring the Senate to create a new Select Committee on Indian River Lagoon and Lake Okeechobee Basin that is looking for "short-term" solutions to the outbreak.

A legislative panel earlier this month OK'd a $2.7 million budget request for South Florida water projects in the hope of providing relief for the dirty water releases from Lake Okeechobee.

Department of Environmental Protection officials said the $2.7 million would help the South Florida Water Management District make improvements to pumping stations that will shoot more lake water south into Everglades National Park. The effort would reduce the flow by about 1 billion gallons a day. The agency is also looking to store water on public lands in the St. Lucie, Okeechobee and Caloosahatchee basins.

And Gov. Rick Scotthas also pledged $37 million in state and local money to begin cleanup of Central and North Florida springs and another $40 million to build the C-44 reservoir on the St. Lucie side of Lake Okeechobee, again to slow discharges into the river.

But Senate Budget Chairman Joe Negron, a Stuart Republican in charge of the basin committee, blasted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a hearing Tuesday for “over-reacting to weather” and “putting way more emphasis on a dike problem and totally under-estimating the economic damage to our communities.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been releasing polluted lake water into the rivers to prevent further weakening of the Herbert Hoover Dike. The long-term solution to the problem would require more than $2 billion to repair the levee, design new reservoirs and finish Everglades restoration.

As of Monday, the lake was at 15.76 feet of water and rising. South Florida Water Management District deputy executive director Ernie Barnett said during the last month, the region has received 8 to 12 inches of rain “and they couldn’t have fallen in worse places.”

According to federal risk-assessments, the dike has a 1 percent probability of a breach at 15-foot levels, but that probability jumps to 45 percent if the water gets to 18 feet deep – which Army Corps officials have argued leaves them no option but to dump the water into the rivers and other flow-ways.

But Negron called that “a knee-jerk reaction, just pulling the plug and making our communities the septic system for Orlando south.”

To that end, Negron said he planned to push for another $1 million to fund an oyster reef and sea grass restoration project targeting both the St. Lucie/Indian River and Caloosahatchee River estuaries.